


On Hand

by Sapphic_Futurist



Series: Sapph's Anti-Soulmate Kinktober Fills 2020 [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Anti-Soulmate Kinktober 2020, Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Kinktober, Kinktober 2020, Loss, M/M, Masturbation, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, NSFW Art, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:47:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26791633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphic_Futurist/pseuds/Sapphic_Futurist
Summary: People did bizarre things to deal with their grief, and Steve told himself this was no different than curling up in one of Tony’s old sweaters or the way Morgan kept her arms wrapped tight around the helmet of the Mark LXXXV.In the beginning, it had helped. He still hadn’t slept, but he had survived.Now… now was another story.Don’t do it. Don’t do this again. You promised that last time was thelasttime.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Series: Sapph's Anti-Soulmate Kinktober Fills 2020 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1968322
Comments: 14
Kudos: 57
Collections: Anti Soulmate Kinktober 2020





	On Hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vicnic90](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vicnic90/gifts).



> Kinktober Day 3  
> Prompt: Masturbation/Solo 
> 
> Thanks to [the lovely Luna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DirtyanonsofThedas/pseuds/in-umbra-gratia) for her beta work. 
> 
> A Big Fucking Thank You to [Abi](https://superdecibels.tumblr.com/) who, when I asked her if I could use her adorable Cap/IM art, drew me a whole new one. Sob. Please see this amazing art at the end of the story. 
> 
> This story is Endgame compliant including canonical character death, set immediately after the funeral. For the purpose of this story please assume Steve did not return to the past and is still alive and well in the present in his regular body. 
> 
> Enjoy!

The new apartment wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t home.

Steve sat by the window, watching the dancing shadows of the trees in the courtyard with his chin resting in the palm of his hand. It was late into autumn now, and the leaves were falling rapidly. Any day the first snowfall would set it and plunge New York into winter.

In a way, Steve felt like he’d been living in a perpetual winter for weeks.

Three months had passed since the Battle for Earth and each new day felt increasingly bleak and dreary. The Avengers were recovering, each in their own way, alongside the rest of the world and Steve remembered the words he had spoken so many times before in his support group. _Move on, take the right steps, the world is ours now._ What did all of that even mean?

How was Steve supposed to take any steps when Tony was gone, literal dust in the wind as Pepper and Morgan had travelled across the country, scattering his ashes in his favourite places. At first, Steve had thought maybe he only needed to find a way to feel closer to Tony. Mourn. Grieve. Figure out a way to let go—as if it were even a possibility.

Steve had followed Tony’s remains across the U.S., spending too many days sitting at the base of the Tower in New York and lying in the grass in the Malibu sun. After Pepper and Morgan had travelled back to the city at the end of the summer, Steve had even let himself rest, his legs dangling off the dock at Lake Tahoe. As he stared up at the shuttered lakehouse the water had slowly turned his toes blue until he’d been forced to turn away.

The entire ordeal had left him with the same empty, hollow feeling; as if someone had dug out everything inside of him that once held meaning and left him a gutted frame of the man he’d been before. That’s what Steve was now. Empty and alone.

Once again, life after Thanos was living in shades of gray.

Bucky and Sam had said that this change might be good for him and though Steve had argued, in the end he had gone along with it. His life had become reduced to a series of decisions and Steve made every one hoping everyone would eventually leave him alone. And mostly they did these days, coming to visit once a week on a near-clockwork rotation to sit in Steve’s little sitting room and look out across the man-made lake below.

The conversations became repeats of the same, a broken, stunted cycle as Steve struggled to put his thoughts together, and Bucky never truly resurfaced as the man he remembered. Sam seemed well enough but Steve found himself torn between guilt and resentment because every time Sam came striding into the room, he found himself wishing Sam were Natasha.

But Tony and Natasha were gone, and Steve was so damned lonely his body ached with it.

He sighed, forcing himself off the bench by the window and back to his bed with the crisp white sheets and perfect corners.

In a way, the new apartment felt almost clinical with it’s white walls and pale blue curtains, littered with his meager belongings. There were only a handful of items left over after the destruction of the Compound, but Steve didn’t need much.

No number of _things_ would stop the room from being too cold and too big, so Steve found himself curled in baggy sweatpants and hoodies that never quite kept out the chill as he tried to fill hours in a way that mattered. Every day was reduced to a battle for warmth and comfort.

Most days he lost. 

Lifting back the sheets, Steve crawled back into the bed with a shiver, curling onto his side where he could still see the sun.

 _Tony._ Where was he now, if he was anywhere at all? 

There had been a time once where Steve believed in the afterlife, back before aliens and Gods, super serum and the mystic arts. Now he wasn’t so sure and that scared him. If there was no afterlife, then Tony didn’t live on anywhere. He was just… gone.

Steve felt the familiar prickle of tears behind his eyes and cleared his throat, curling the sheets up under his chin and trying to sleep. Behind his eyes, Tony’s bright smile, the teasing smirk that curled across his lips, mocked him.

If he focused, he could even hear Tony’s voice. _Stop being so maudlin Rogers, it’s worse than that stick up your ass. Don’t tell me you really miss me that much?_

He shoved the thoughts away, yanking himself back from the inevitable slippery slope of imagining Tony’s voice. There were sick places in the back of his mind—that much he could admit—and he was ashamed that he kept indulging them.

Glancing at the ridiculous little toy on his nightstand, Steve huffed a bitter little laugh.

It was ridiculous, really, to have such an attachment to something so meaningless and trivial. And couldn’t he see just picture himself: admitting the truth, bulky shoulders crammed into Father McCarthy’s confessional box in the heart of Brooklyn. 

_Forgive me father for I have sinned, it has been decades since my last confession. I find myself thinking impure thoughts about my dead friend. Sometimes I act on them._

Shame shot through his stomach, the acid turning over, bubbling up into his mouth to leave the back of his throat burning and raw.

The puppet just sat there, teasing him.

Two weeks after the battle, when the Compound was still in shambles, a box of toys had arrived. It hadn’t just been an Iron Man puppet, there had been a whole series of children’s toys created as a new incentive to raise additional funds for the restored snap victims.

Stark Industries’ idea, of course, and Steve had approved.

Those first few nights, Steve had still been sleeping in a cot, shoved between Bucky’s and Sam’s, waking up screaming from the raw terror of his nightmares. Every night, Tony died again and again, screaming while he stared into Steve’s eyes. It was only natural that he’d picked up the puppet. People did bizarre things to deal with their grief, and Steve told himself this was no different than curling up in one of Tony’s old sweaters or the way Morgan kept her arms wrapped tight around the helmet of the Mark LXXXV.

In the beginning, it had helped. He still hadn’t slept, but he had survived.

Now… now was another story.

 _Don’t do it. Don’t do this again. You promised that last time was the_ last _time_.

Steve reached across the nightstand and tugged the small puppet into the bed with him.

It was just large enough for his hand to slide inside, a ridiculous little caricature of what Iron Man had been. The eyes were too large, taking up too much of the face plate, and the arc reactor in the centre of the chest was the wrong shade of blue. Steve should know; he’d mixed acrylics into that perfect, cerulean blue light countless times over the last few years.

He dragged a hand over the soft red and gold material and was bombarded with a flurry of Iron Man images. Tony had truly been a genius, the creativity in his mind knowing no bounds and Steve had admired every mark of his suit, from the desert to the last.

There were a lot of things to admire about Tony. The sweet chocolate brown of his eyes and the way those eyes crinkled when he laughed. The way he talked with his hands, always a cyclone of motion. The way he teased the people he loved, relentlessly.

Sometimes, Steve liked to think that maybe that meant that Tony had loved him too, pushing his buttons and getting under his skin because he too could feel the connection between them. He couldn’t have been the only one to feel the magnetic pull of something bigger than just the two of them, drawing them together.

Sometimes Steve liked to think they were soulmates.

But Tony was gone now, and Steve was left with this shell of a puppet, a mockery of the man that he loved from a distance for years.

If he closed his eyes, Tony was there with him, propped at the edge of his bed, eyes dark and hooded with desire. The shame curled into arousal and a sharp twist of tension wound deep in Steve’s belly. How many times had he pictured those eyes on him, watching him, while Tony dragged his bottom lip between his teeth and gave a little twitch of his eyebrows? A silent, _go on_ , as Steve felt heat rise on the skin of his cheeks and throat.

He let himself slip into the fantasy.

What was the harm? No one else had to know.

Steve slid a hand down his chest, pulling the zipper of the hoodie down as he went and imaging it was Tony’s hands on him. Tony’s hands, creeping up under the bottom of his shirt, pinching one of his nipples and Tony leaning over him, breathing hot air into his mouth. Arousal stretched bowstring tight in the pit of Steve’s stomach and he swallowed, relaxing into the mattress and giving himself over to the coiling heat.

What would Tony whisper to him? Something sweet this time. Tony would want to take things slow, to savour and enjoy. They’d just saved the world after all, and after the frantic passion had been sated there would be time for love and deep, desperate desire.

 _Look at you,_ Tony would say, _you’re so beautiful Steve. I could look at you for hours_.

Tony was the beautiful one, scars and all, a map of his life literally printed across his skin and Steve would traverse the globe, kissing and tasting every plane and peak of his body until every inch of Tony belonged to him.

But not this time. This time, Tony had other ideas.

 _Let me help you out,_ he’d say, tugging at the waistband of Steve’s pants as they shoved them down his legs together. _Ah, don’t touch, this is about you, soldier_.

And Steve would smile, huff a breath even as he let himself relax back against his pillow, eyes closed to feel the whisper of spectre’s hands across his skin. He deserved this. It was all about him.

Steve reached down to get a grip on his cock, resting hard and throbbing against his belly, and pleasure crackled along every nerve ending. He’d let Tony watch. He’d _want_ Tony to watch, talking to him in that never-ending monologue and telling him what to do, how to stroke himself just right, the way that Tony would if they were there together.

_Start slow, Steve, that’s how I’d do it. Nice and gentle. I’d tease you like that for a while just to get a feel for you in my hand. You feel amazing, Steve, so hot and hard for me. God, is this really all for me?_

Steve groaned, thrusting up into his grip and curling his other fist tighter around the little puppet in his hand. It couldn’t be wrong if it felt this good and Tony would want him to feel good. Tony would want him to be happy, that’s what everyone kept saying.

If that was true, why was the shame curling tighter and tighter in his core, biting at the pleasure that didn’t fade as he worked his palm up over his cockhead?

Shoving his other hand into the puppet, Steve cracked his eyes open and glanced down at the little Iron Man. The material was worn now, pilling and thin from too many tumbles through the washing machine. But it didn’t matter, Steve had his eidetic memory and when he looked at it, it was like looking right into Tony’s perfect, handsome face.

 _Stop stalling, darling, get down to business. I’m here for the show and I intend to get my money’s worth_.

Steve curled his fingers back around his cock, tugging it roughly from stem to tip and letting his thumb drag over the tip. The blankets were pushed back in a creased puddle over his thighs and he hardly noticed the chill. It was hard to feel cold when Tony’s eyes were on him, heating him wherever Tony’s gaze landed. He thrust up hard into his fist and the pleasure built. Steve could almost taste Tony, what he imagined would be coffee and blueberries, and smell the familiar scent of motor oil on his skin.

 _Show me how you like it. Let me see how you stroke that pretty cock, Steve_.

Steve bit back a groan, stroking himself in earnest, rubbing the puppet across his chest where the fabric rasped over his nipples, teasing them into taut little points. Just hearing the sound of Tony’s voice left his cock pulsing between his legs, a drop of precome leaking from the tip to slick the way. Steve let his thumb press into the slit, spreading the moisture before teasing himself just below the glans until his thighs were twitching with the sensitivity.

It felt so, deliriously good, Steve wanted to sob. He wanted Tony’s hands on him, body pressed along his from feet to shoulders. He _wanted_. 

_That’s it, gorgeous. Just relax. You look perfect like this Steve, all spread out, stroking your cock. Do you have any idea what you do to me?_

“Tony,” Steve groaned, barely more than a whisper, thrusting up into his fist and gasping as he imagined Tony watching, licking his lips and oh—

The fantasy shifted then, and Steve gritted his teeth as the tension in his belly wound tighter.

_Would you let me suck you, Captain? I’d make it worth your while. You want to know how I’d do it? You do, I know you, Steve. You picture my mouth around your cock all the time, don’t you?_

Of course, he did. Every damn day since New York.

_God, that’s hot. If you let me, I promise I wouldn’t tease you. I’d lick the tip, just to get a taste, and then I’d swallow you all the way back until you could feel yourself in my throat. I worked hard for that skill, you know, and you could just stay there, fucking my face until you were ready to come. Would you like that, handsome?_

“Yes,” Steve gasped, forcing himself to switch hands and wrapping the Iron Man puppet around his screaming erection. It was the furthest thing from Tony’s mouth but when he did it like this, when he pumped his hips up into the fabric, it was almost like he was fucking into Tony’s warmth, driving inside him over and over again. “Tony, fuck, please. Please, Tony.”

Steve glanced up to the shut door before he looked down and took in the sight of the Iron Man puppet curled around his cock and shuddered. Humiliation searing across his chest in a striking red flush and he tried to ignore it.

This was wrong. He shouldn’t do this. It wasn’t right.

But he couldn’t bring himself to stop, jerking off in earnest now in a race towards the finish line. In the end, the shame always lost, because this was Tony and Steve needed him more than he needed air to breathe.

 _Come on,_ Tony whispered, and Steve could almost feel Tony’s lips pressed up against his ear, breathing out filth and urging him on. _I know you want it, Steve. You can have it. Take it. Come all over me. Don’t you want to mess me up? I’d look so good covered in your come. I’d be yours Steve, forever._

“Oh, fuck. God, Tony, yes—”

_Do it. Come, Steve. Come on, fucking come all over me. I’m yours. Do you hear me, Steve? Yours. I belong to you and I always will._

Steve’s breathing hitched and he arched forward, coming with a bitten off moan as streaks of cloudy-white overtook the red and gold fabric, seeping into the faceplate and covering the little arc reactor. It just kept coming as Steve emptied himself onto the puppet, stroking himself through every aftershock until he was shaking and desperate to catch his breath.

Wave after wave of pleasure rolled through his body and for a moment all the humming in Steve’s brain stopped. For one, blissful moment, there was only Tony.

 _Beautiful. Just beautiful, my love_.

Steve felt a phantom kiss to his lips and smiled, letting his eyes drift close to savour the moment. He floated along the sea of endorphins and imagined Tony tucked in beside him with his head on Steve’s chest, tracing little patterns across his belly and traversing the trail of hair that led down from his navel. 

It could have been hours, but eventually—

 _Time to clean up, Steve. Up you go, get up_.

Steve rolled out of the bed and stumbled into the bathroom, cleaning up himself before bringing a wet cloth back to clean off the puppet. When there was no evidence left, Steve set the puppet back where it belonged next to the lamp on the night table and snuggled back into the warmth of his bed.

Tony was always so pushy about clean-up, claiming that he was shy and didn’t want anyone to walk in. It had happened before and the reactions had been… unsavoury and judgemental. No one ever understood. 

After, it was easy enough for Steve to drop back into the fantasy and lose himself in what it might be like to have Tony in his bed with him, sated and relaxed. Tony would be so warm with his legs tangled with Steve’s as they traded soft, loving kisses. The chill would be gone and Steve could spend the rest of his life in perfect contentment, at peace and fulfilled. They’d never leave the bedroom, if he had any say in the matter.

God, Steve missed him.

“Steven, honey?”

Steve jerked his head towards the door, the illusion shattering in an instant. The intruder, Amy, or maybe Amanda, a large woman with streaky grey hair and an ill-fitting pair of scrubs, stood at the threshold.

“Dinner started a few minutes ago. Aren’t you coming to join us?”

“Yeah, I’ll be right there,” he bit out. Steve cleared his throat. He didn’t have much to say these days and his voice was mechanical and flat, rusted from disuse. 

Amy-Amanda smiled, gentle and understanding. “Alright, hurry along, it’s lasagna on the menu. And remember there’s group tonight. Maybe you’ll share something with us?”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

The nurse gave him another long look, before she pressed her lips together in something Steve had come to recognize as a sympathy that bordered on pity. She nodded slowly, and when it was clear she wasn’t leaving, Steve sighed again and pushed himself out of the bed. Zipping up his hoodie, Steve folded the blankets back into their perfect corners over the mattress.

When he got to the doorway, he glanced back at the puppet still watching him from the nightstand.

“Tony has to stay here,” Amy-Amanda said, soft but firm.

“I know.” Steve shoved his feet into a pair of slippers and followed the nurse out of the room, down the hallway, and into the cafeteria.

He ate with measured bites until all the food was gone, lost in a fugue marked by the sloping grace of Tony’s hands as he prepared them something far better than the pasta the hospital provided. Once upon a time Steve might’ve had that—the soft domesticity of watching Tony at work in their kitchen—coming up behind him and curling his arms around his waist. Opening his mouth and letting Tony sneak tastes between his lips under the thin guise of teasing each other until the meal was finished.

Tony’s hair would be soft, greying more every day, with the spicy smell of his cologne wafting up from the curve of his neck. Steve would press his face into that space, close his eyes and just breathe. Steve would be home.

He swallowed the last of the tasteless pasta, passing his dessert towards the sad older woman across the table who never spoke and the images disappeared. She’d been here longer than Steve could bear to comprehend, a constant reminder that even when Tony was here with him, they were anywhere but home. No one ever came to her weekly visits.

Steve turned away, emotion thickening in the back of his throat. Across the room, something moved behind the criss-crossed, reinforced glass. 

The first snow was starting to fall.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the Put on the Suit Discord Server Golden Hours and their raunchy conversations about puppets. I'm sorry, I don't think this was quite what you were talking about.
> 
> Check out the rest of our Kinktober 2020 fills in the [Anti-Soulmate Kinktober Collection.](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Anti_Soulmate_Kinktober_2020/profile)
> 
> If you've a fan of dark, psychological work or gut-wrenching angst, come hangout with us in the [SteveTony Darkfest Discord Server](https://discord.com/invite/X9xaRPT) and check out the Sad Secret Santa event! Write with us!


End file.
